Category: Science

The Commercialization of Low Earth Orbit

In a little more than a year from now, late 2017 or early 2018, the first commercial manned space flight will take place as either Boeing or Space-X launch their first manned missions to the International Space Station (ISS).

There’s much more to come. Last week in a news conference NASA’s deputy associate administrator Bill Hill discussed NASA’s goal of turning over control of the ISS to a commercial firm(s) on or around 2024.

NASA’s plan is to support private investment in Low Earth Orbit (LEO), private development of the infrastructure of Space between Earth’s surface and LEO while NASA concentrates on it’s program of exploration to Mars, Asteroids and back to the Moon.

Other corporations are also investing in the colonization of LOE, that’s what it is really. Orbital Sciences, Blue Origin and Sierra Nevada are developing manned spacecraft while Bigelow has already launched an inflatable habitation module which is currently undergoing testing at the ISS.

The question of course is whether these companies can make a profit in space? For the next decade or so these Space-X and the others will be heavily if not exclusively dependent on NASA for orders. There’s been a lot of talk about space tourism or mining asteroids but it’s hard to see those industries providing the billions of dollars the commercialization of LEO will require.

The next decade will see a lot of hard work, a lot of plans that won’t fulfill their promise but by 2025 or so we should see the beginnings of the real colonization of Space.

Have Scientists discovered a Fifth Force of Nature. Probably not, but it would be really cool

During the past week there’s been a lot of talk about Theoretical Physics at the University of California Irvine analyzing data from the Institute for Nuclear Research at Debrecen Hungary, some news articles have even called the UC Irvine analysis a conformation. What’s all this about.

First of all, a little background. Modern Physics recognizes four Forces of nature: Gravity, Electromagnetism and two Forces that only work over the immensely short nuclear distances. These are called the Strong (or color) force and the Weak force.

For nearly forty years now physicists have been looked for something beyond the standard model of particles and forces because the standard model cannot describe gravity at the nuclear scale, nor does it describe the motions of galaxies attributed to “Dark Matter” nor finally the accelerated expansion of the universe attributed to “Dark Energy”.

Now, what the researchers in Hungary were doing was to take nuclei of Lithium and bombard them with energetic protons turning them into nuclei of Beryllium in an excited state, excited state in important. The excited Beryllium nuclei would then sometimes decay into Beryllium in the ground state by emitting a gamma ray photon (a very high energy particle of light) and the gamma ray would then split into an electron-positron pair.

Measuring the energy spectrum of the gamma rays the group in Hungary found a bump at an energy of 17 million electron volts that could be due to a particle other than the gamma photons, an unknown particle. The theoreticians at UC Irvine then looked at the Hungarian data and determined that the new particle would be a force carrying Boson. The data implied not just a new particle but a new force.

First of all, the work at UC Irvine is not a conformation it is an analysis. Conformation requires another laboratory to replicate the data from Hungary. Fortunately the energy levels involved are low enough to allow many laboratories to do the experiment and confirm the Hungarian’s work, or otherwise. we should have an answer soon, a year or so.

This is the fourth time in my career someone has announced a fifth force and each time previously the new force quickly disappeared when subject to additional scrutiny. I’m hopeful, because a new force would be really cool, and I’ll keep reading the published articles, but I’m not holding my breath.